Domains – Eight reasons to love generic keyword domains

It has been virtually been 15 years now since the Internet first took off and I still find that some marketing people still don’t give domain names any importance. They just think that they can get away with just some decent content, a few links, a blog and by putting together a couple of videos and with all that Google will find you with ease. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy.

Some people though are just born lucky and will manage to get credibility from Google and make it to a number one ranking. It may seem all rosy at the beginning as the site gets regular traffic, the mailing list grows and branding projects put into place. Now the problem with a poor generic keyword domain at this stage is that a poorly created domain name just won’t stick, people forget it if it is not related to your particular niche and the negative turn begins.

Remember that incredibly stupid site from the Dot Com era, Quokka.com? The same company who spent a bazillion dollars of their poor investors money on print, TV, and outdoor advertising to build a “non-brand? Do you remember their niche? Think hard.

If you were out of the country or whatever this Quokka.com was focused on the action sports network. Now I will leave it up to you to pass judgment but who in their tiny mind would base a whole branding campaign on a word that can’t even be pronounced properly like Quokka, I just think they tried to run before they had learned to walk, but there are so many more cases like this out there so I can’t stress enough the importance of a well thought out domain name.

So with all that money to spend they couldn’t come up with an ideal name like actionsports.com or similar. They were in a nutshell “stupid”, but now we all know better. The key benefits of generic keyword domain names are something that we all need to understand and the top reasons are;- 1. Make your product more than obvious in your domain name so for example everyone knows what bestpropertyinvestments.com deal with and you can take that for granted when people actually visit your site.

2. Permanently lock out competitors: Owning the domain is the ultimate form of owning the keyword, and being able to block competition is more than a minor coup. It forces them to buy dozens of keywords around the main keyword for type-in traffic, and build their primary online brand on an inferior domain. 3. Massive credibility: Generic keyword domains have become a sort of defacto brand with consumers. Whether it’s MiniTruckParts.com, Rumcakes.com, or Hotels.com, the site that lives at the generic dot com address gets extra props from consumers, whether deserved or not.

4. Type-in traffic pays dividends: Nearly all keyword domain names will get some sort of traffic and there are others that will get just hundreds of unique visitors every day. This traffic that is driven through people who use their address bar instead of their search bar to surf the web will convert into real sales and that is a statistical fact. 5. Our favorite search engine Google as well as the rest concentrate their efforts in finding relevant sites for their users, so a site like PetFood.com would be ranked in the top 2 pages for the keyword “pet food” and will get a lot a traffic sent to them from Google for people interested in buying pet food.

6. Park your domain: If you want to hold on a bit before you develop the site there is no need to worry as there are plenty of different ways to reap high benefits from a good generic keyword domain. 7. A safe investment: It has been seen that over the last few years generic domains as an investment have had better results than even the stock market, real-estate, bonds, and overall inflation. Presidents of major companies are now just seeing that the power of a generic name has converted it’s role in marketing into being the backbone of companies that seek continued growth.

8. Low carrying cost: All that for under $ 10/year? You gotta love this business! So what are the lessons here… * If you are a domainer, pay a more attention to generic keyword names than the latest fad of the week. LLL.coms, brandables, and numeric names have a place in your portfolio, but don’t have the staying-power of real words that actually mean something. * If you are a business owner, remember the bit about owning the keyword. It may seem stupid to spend 6 figures on a domain, but not if you can make your money back in a year or two, then own the category forever.